The Mainstream Media Is Using “Trolling” As An Excuse To Censor The Right

Free Market Shooter was recently presented with an article from Vogue detailing the steps Google’s Yasmin Green is taking to become a “slayer” of internet trolls. A few notable excerpts are below:

“We have that geopolitical lens,” Green tells me. “We have the mandate to think ahead, rather than respond to what’s happening at the moment. To think prophetically.”

“Our job is to get more and better information in the hands of vulnerable people,” she says.

“How can we illustrate this?” asks Green. How, in other words, can the threat be explained so that you don’t have to be a Silicon Valley programmer to understand it?

Does this sound at all to you like a simple reprogramming of search algorithms? Because it sure reads a lot more like McCarthy-ist censorship. And a closer look at Google’s strategy reveals that is exactly what Google intends to do, with right-wing news as the target.

“This came out of an observation that there’s a lot of online demand for ISIS material, but there are also a lot of credible organic voices online debunking their narratives,” says Yasmin Green, Jigsaw’s head of research and development.

“The Redirect Method is at its heart a targeted advertising campaign: Let’s take these individuals who are vulnerable to ISIS’ recruitment messaging and instead show them information that refutes it.”

Ross Frenett, co-founder of Moonshot, said his company and Jigsaw are now working with funding from private groups, including the Gen Next Foundation, to target other violent extremists, including on the hard right.

“We are very conscious — as our own organization and I know Jigsaw are — that this [violent extremism] is not solely the problem of one particular group,” Frenett said.

In the past, when a journalist or academic exposes one of these algorithmic hiccups, humans at Google quietly make manual adjustments in a process that’s neither transparent nor accountable.

At the same time, politically motivated third parties including the “alt-right”, a far-right movement in the US, use a variety of techniques to trick the algorithm and push propaganda and misinformation higher up Google’s search rankings.

Google is trying to improve the quality of its search results by directing review teams to flag content that might come across as upsetting or offensive.

With the change, content with racial slurs could now get flagged under a new category called “upsetting-offensive.” So could content that promotes hate or violence against a specific group of people based on gender, race or other criteria.

While flagging something doesn’t directly affect the search results themselves, it’s used to tweak the company’s software so that better content ranks higher. This approach might, for instance, push down content that is inaccurate or has other questionable attributes, thereby giving prominence to trustworthy sources.

The review teams – comprised of contractors known as “quality raters” – already comb through websites and other content to flag questionable items such as pornography. Google added “upsetting-offensive” in its latest guidelines for quality raters. Google declined to comment on the changes, which were reported in the blog Search Engine Land and elsewhere.

You got that right – a “review team” is subjectively deciding which content it will censor. What happened to the programmers and objectively censoring “trolls” and abuse? The whole thing is much more similar to McCarthyism, except instead of targeting “communists” during the Cold War, they are targeting “right-wing” websites and individuals. Truly a threat to “national security” in the same vein as ISIS, isn’t it?

If you take a closer look at Vogue’s article on Yasmin Green, which reads much more like a self-promoting puff piece detailing her style choices and educational background far more than it details anything substantive on how Google will become a “slayer” of trolls, you’ll see where her ideas on censorship likely came from.

“I actually told my family and friends in London that I’m not going to settle in New York,” she recalls. “Obviously! It’s a very aggressive city. It’ll rub off on me. And then you know what? I met a New Yorker and married and had a New York baby.”

She went to University College London, then the London School of Economics, then worked at a consulting firm, where she specialized in oil and gas and traveled throughout Africa and the Middle East, comparing cultures in a way that, when she looks back now, destined her to work at a place like Jigsaw. When a job at Google came up, Green saw a chance to be on the corporation’s intellectual front guard.

It’s quite amusing that someone who has traveled Africa and the Middle East, areas of the world where repression and censorship are so commonplace that they are readily accepted as “part of” the culture, is claiming to working to fight against repression and to stand up for free speech by censoring “hurtful” opinions they oh-so conveniently happen to disagree with. But what else would you expect, from someone who lives in a place as “accepting” and “diverse” as New York City?

If Jigsaw really wanted to combat “trolling” and “fake news”, perhaps they would start by flagging CNN as “upsetting-offensive” before anything else? Meet Google’s Intelligence Officer and Mata Hari of the web:

Yasmin Green (née Dolatabadi) was born in Tehran in 1981 and raised in London, where, aged 16 she played on the England Junior Women’s National Basketball team. She later received her B.Sc. in Economics from University College London and her M.Sc. in Management from the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

Today, Yasmin is the Head of Research and Development for Jigsaw (previously Google Ideas), a technology incubator within Alphabet Inc. focused on solving global security challenges through technology. She oversees the team’s research as well as its work on counter-radicalization and online hate, harassment, and intimidation.

At Google Ideas, Yasmin was Head of Sales Strategy and Operations for Southern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, and prior to joining Google, consulted for Booz Allen Hamilton across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Yasmin has extensive experience leading and project managing in some of the world’s toughest environments and has spent time in Syria, UAE and Nigeria, where she has worked cross-functionally in sectors ranging from oil and gas to the internet. She recently led a multi-partner coalition to launch Against Violent Extremism, the world’s first online network of former violent extremists and survivors of terrorism.

Yasmin is a Senior Advisor on Innovation to Oxford Analytica and Co-Chair of the European Commission’s Working Group on Online Radicalization. In 2016, she was named a Women inPower Fellow. She also serves on the Board of the Tory Burch Foundation. She lives in New York City with her musician/artist/filmmaker husband Adam Green and their two-year-old daughter Zeba. Yasmin and Adam recently joined forces to produce Adam Green’s Aladdin, a psychedelic papier-mâché re-make of the Arabic Nights folk tale, starring Macaulay Culkin. #inspiringwomen #womenintech #iranianwomen #heforshe #proudpersian #yasmingreen #google #yasmindolatabadi #googleideas #womeninpower

Google’s Sergey Brin got into America under the special privilege for Soviet Jews immigration law. Which was introduced into the US Senate by Jewish Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ)

It should be noted that a representative from Google’s new 1984-style internet political dissent suppression program, Jigsaw, will be at the ADL conference as well. Expect nasty things to happen to our 1st Amendment right to criticize Jews following this gathering of high power Jews and NGO collaborators.

Ironically enough, in Wikileaks’ publishing three years later of the Global Intelligence Files — internal emails from the private security firm, Stratfor — Cohen’s and Google’s true depth of influence became strikingly apparent. Assange wrote:

Cohen’s directorate appeared to cross over from public relations and ‘corporate responsibility’ work into active corporate intervention in foreign affairs at a level that is normally reserved for states. Jared Cohen could be wryly named Google’s ‘director of regime change.’ According to the emails, he was trying to plant his fingerprints on some of the major historical events in the contemporary Middle East. He could be placed in Egypt during the revolution, meeting with Wael Ghonim, the Google employee whose arrest and imprisonment hours later would make him a PR-friendly symbol of the uprising in the Western press. Meetings had been planned in Palestine and Turkey, both of which—claimed Stratfor emails—were killed by the senior Google leadership as too risky. Only a few months before he met with me, Cohen was planning a trip to the edge of Iran in Azerbaijan to ‘engage the Iranian communities closer to the border,’ as part of Google Ideas’ project on repressive societies.

Of course, the massive company — its various facets now under the umbrella of Alphabet, Inc. — has never been fully absent government involvement. Research for what would become ultimately become Google had been undertaken by company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in cooperation with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) — the strictly secretive technological testing and planning arm for the Department of Defense.

Indeed Google’s continued coziness with the diplomacy, military, and intelligence wings of the United States government should not be, though perpetually are, ignored.

Political establishment bulldogs on both sides of the aisle and their cheerleader corporate media presstitutes will continue for months or years to debate the failed presidential bid of Hillary Clinton and the apparently shocking rise and election of Donald Trump, but technology played a starring role in those events. Several reports last year cautioned Google’s algorithms could swing the election — and not only the American election but national elections around the globe.

We estimate, based on win margins in national elections around the world,” said Robert Epstein, a psychologist with the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology and author of one of the studies, “that Google could determine the outcome of upwards of 25 percent of all national elections.

Considering lines between the tech giant and the government have essentially been abandoned, this revelation puts power and influence into acute, if not terrifying, perspective.Google’s ties with the Pentagon and intelligence communities never ceased. Revealed by a Freedom of Information Act request cited by Assange, Google founder Brin, together with Schmidt, corresponded casually by email with National Security Agency chief Gen. Keith Alexander in 2012, discussing a program called the “Enduring Society Framework.”

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